Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord - Sarah MacLean (Love By Numbers #2)

Sarah MacLean is an author whose back catalog I am now working through.  After reading Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, I got another of her books, The Rogue Not Taken, from the library.  However, I quickly discovered that the heroine of that book was a side character in the third book of the series that Nine Rules started, so I set to reading through those first.  Ten Ways is the second book there.

Our heroine here is Isabel, the daughter of an earl who has barely kept the estate together in the face of his wasteful behavior--and has run a house for women looking to escape terrible situations to boot.  All of that seems to be in danger when her father dies, the estate is left to a mysterious guardian until her ten-year-old brother can come of age, and there's not a penny to be found.  Oh, and the daughter of a duke shows up on her doorstep looking for help, which Isabel knows is going to cause trouble.

Trouble comes calling indeed, though Isabel doesn't know it right away.  It arrives in the form of Nicholas St. John, the brother of the hero from the first book, who has been asked by the aforementioned duke to find the missing sister, a task he gladly takes up to escape the slavering women of London, who are eager to nab him as one of London's most landable lords.  But when he and Isabel first run into each other, she sees Nick's value in his knowledge of antiquities, particularly marble statues--a bunch of which she owns and is eager to sell to fund the ongoing existence of Minerva House.  With an invitation into Isabel's abode, things are set for the two worlds to collide.

This book relies much more heavily on instalove than the first book did.  While the pacing in the first book was somewhat whacky, it still took place over at least a few weeks.  This book takes place over a number of days, and suddenly Isabel, who has always been leery of men because of the behavior of her father and the plights of women--mostly done over by men--who she shelters at Minerva house, is suddenly gaga over the first cute guy who shows up.  (Note how I said "cute"; other guys showed up at Isabel's house, claiming she had to marry them because her father gambled her away, but none of them seemed remarkably attractive.)  Honestly, Georgianna was a more interesting plot line here.  I wanted to know about her failed romance, what was going to happen to her.  She has her own book later down the line, in another of MacLean's series, but she definitely overshadowed Isabel, who didn't seem nearly as steady and levelheaded as we're supposed to think.  Her instant gaga-ing, but how she refuses to accept help she so desperately needs, just didn't seem to fit, and it didn't work well as a coherent whole.

But this book was mercifully lacking in mentions of "sweet rain," so at least there's that.

Overall, this was enjoyable, but I didn't like it as much as the first one.  I probably wouldn't read it again, and honestly couldn't remember much about it--even Isabel's name--by the time I went to read the third book only a few days later, which doesn't really speak highly of it.  I think there was a lot of cool concepts here, such as Minerva House.  Women helping women is so great to see!  However, as nothing every really happened to threaten this in any serious way, it was underdone and didn't have enough impact to carry the rest of the book.

2 stars out of 5.

Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake - Sarah MacLean (Love By Numbers #1)

For those who aren't avidly watching the romance community, there is currently a trash fire going on in which an author trademarked the word "cocky" for use in titles of books and series.  This is a bitch move, and it's not going particularly well for her, but it's brought up a lot of interesting conversations about titling and tropes in the romance genre as a whole.  We romance readers love our tropes--and why not, as long as they're done well?  And titles tie in very closely with them, because it lets you know exactly what you're going to get, in a way that other genres don't practice that same variety of branding.  For example, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake implies that a heroine is going to behave badly while falling in love with a man who is known to be a womanizer in high society.  In contrast, here are a few other books I'm currently reading: The Sparrow, In the Garden of Beasts, The Unimaginable, Salt & Storm.  None of these titles really tell you what the book is about--and let me tell you, The Sparrow is definitely not about small birds.  But these romance titling conventions mean that, while you're never guaranteed to like a book, for a variety of reasons, you know if the book you pick up is going to trend in a direction you'll like.  And for that reason, romance can be an extremely comforting genre to browse, because you know exactly what to look for in order to get what you want.

I've been having reading difficulties recently.  While I've liked a lot of books, I haven't loved very many yet this year, and I've found a lot that ended up being just okay.  In the middle of several other books that weren't impressing me very much, I turned away to a good-old standby, the historical romance.  And luckily, I had just gotten off the waitlist for this book.  Sarah MacLean's name has crossed my field of vision many times--due to friends reading her books, due to her books being recommended for people who like other books I've read, due to her writing a romance column for the Washington Post.  Somehow, despite all of this, I had not read any of hers.  But NRTBWRAR (geeze) seemed like as good a place to start as any.

The book starts with an encounter between our heroine, Calpurnia "Callie" Hartwell, who is curvy and plainer than is fashionable and who languishes for ever finding a husband during a terrible Season when she eighteen, and our hero, Gabriel, a marquess with a bit of a womanizing reputation who never wants to marry due to how his mother acted when he was young.  Then we skip ahead ten years--Callie is on the shelf, sitting in "Spinster Seating" at balls, and watching her dazzling younger sister getting ready to marry a duke.  Gabriel, in the meantime, has found a previously-unknown half-sister dumped on his doorstep, and is determined to do right by her and bring her out in society, but he'll need the help of a respectable woman to do so.  When Callie turns up at his house in the middle of the night, looking for an adventure of her own, Gabriel decides she's perfect for the task, as her reputation has never been objectionable at all--though if Callie completes her adventure list, she'll be ruined for sure...

The banter here is good.  Callie is taking charge of her own life, even if only one or two other people know it.  She is determined to live, and to take hold of the experiences she wants even if she isn't supposed to want them--like learning to fence or attending a duel, things that ladies are not supposed to do.  Her sister is also lovely and charming and supportive, to the degree that she knows what Callie is doing, and Gabriel's sister, Juliana, is definitely set up for a good book of her own at the end of the trilogy--I presume the second book will focus on Gabriel's twin brother.  Even Gabriel's former mistress ended up being surprisingly nice, and I was pleased that MacLean didn't go for cattiness between the old lover and the new in order to drive the plot.  Women don't have to be nasty to each other, guys!  It's possible!

I liked Gabriel overall, though I didn't always find him to be the most interesting.  I also found him a bit more...absent, I guess, than I thought a proper romance hero should have been--both emotionally and physically.  He popped in and out, mostly when Callie was having one of her adventures, but I would have liked to see a bit more reaction between them.  Additionally, oh dear stars above, someone please erase the phrase "sweet rain" from the English language.  Like, what?  Ew.  Stop.  Also, Gabriel is kind of a jerk for most of the book.  This is pretty common in the genre, but even when Gabriel blundered quite badly, he was very, very slow to make apologies or amends for it, more so than he should have been.

Overall, I liked this quite a bit.  Not a raving, "must have it again and again" book, but something that definitely leavened my reading slump somewhat.  I'm looking forward to reading some of MacLean's other books and seeing what else she has to offer.

4 stars out of 5.